Just when we were getting our heads around “Google Instant”, the search engine giant is throwing another layer of complexity into organic search results and managing your organic search strategy. Today Google announced the launch of “Instant Previews”.

Imagine, within seconds, a searcher can obtain a visual of your web site and the keyword phrase they searched on, contextually highlighted in the preview without ever clicking through to your site. That is mind blowing!

According to Google, the intent of Instant Previews is to “help people bypass websites that are either irrelevant or simply too visually cluttered for their tastes.”

With this topic hot off the press, the gShift Labs team met this morning and collectively came up with these 4 points on how Google Instant Previews changes things which we believe are for the best.

1. A strong content strategy will continue to win. Organic search is still about content and understanding then optimizing for keyword phrases. The basics and the backbone of organic search continue to lead the way. Understand the keywords that your best prospects are using to find you, understand the conversion rates on those keywords, constantly tweak and you will win.

If you already have a strong content strategy, you’re ahead of the pack. If you’ve identified that you need to improve your content, now is a great time to get it done.

2. An SEO-friendly web design is more important than ever. Since Google will be previewing your site as html, if it can’t interpret the website code, it might penalize you or perhaps not even try to render your site in its preview mode, lessening the chances of searchers clicking through.

Talk to your web designer and ask this question, “One a scale of 1 to 10 how search engine friendly is our web design?” If they don’t know what you’re talking about then you’re likely in trouble.

3. More people will use organic search compared to Adwords. We think more people than ever will use organic search over paid search because they will have the opportunity to preview their destination. With 70% of people already favouring organic search results over paid, we suspect Google Instant Previews will make organic even more enticing.

4. Black-hat techniques such as content hiding will lose. Content hiding is a tricky way to get Google to think you have more keyword phrases on your web page then you really do. For example, black-hat SEO professionals might write white content on a white background. Google Instant Previews decreases the likelihood of searchers clicking through on an irrelevant website because of black-hat techniques and the gShift team loves that!

There is still a lot to know about what impact Google Instant Previews will have on the overall SEO world, but the gShift team so far gives it 2 thumbs up.

Google Instant Previews will be rolled out by the Google geniuses over the upcoming days and weeks. If you want to see an overview, visit this official Google web page.